Thursday, June 9, 2016

Dear Blog

It’s occurred to me to return to writing this blog in more of a diary form. I did this for a long time and then, nine or ten years ago when life went a bit I don’t want to talk about it, I stopped out of embarrassment and privacy and never went back even though life is mostly completely fine to talk about these days.

Today (it's yesterday now because I couldn't post this right away) I spent some hours battling with an illustration of a girl hugging a dog on a sofa surrounded by dinosaurs for a picture book I’m working on (not anything really ready to put out into the world yet). My picture book is actually a bit I don’t want to talk about it just now with publishing being very very slow for reasons some of which are my fault and quite a lot not at all my fault actually thank you very much. I have another idea that I should really work on at the same time but instead I am mostly doing DIY because after seven months of I don’t want to talk about it (these italics are getting old already aren’t they?) we (Andrea and I) managed to become the proud owners of the flat that we have been renting in North East London for the last three years or so.

Recently the DIY includes my very wonky but now surprisingly solid attempts to convert/recycle our dilapidated and rotten shed into a studio so that I can pretend to go out to work during the daytime. In the last six weeks or so I also managed to re-roof our kitchen bay-window, saving us almost a thousand pounds and instilling in me the misguided confidence to tackle the shed/studio thing.

Currently the shed looks like a padded cell for a paranoid conspiracy theorist (don’t laugh) or, you know, that scene from Better Call Saul with the tin foil, because I’ve covered the inner walls in, well, tin-foil (insulating bubble-wrap foil). Before this I more or less rebuilt the floor and each rotten corner. I don’t quite know how it was still standing, with all four corners rotten away, but now it is standing on firm (again with the laughing!) if ad-hoc foundations. I had to jack the whole thing up using a spade and and anyone who saw from neighbouring windows will have had a good snigger at how awkward the whole process was.

I’ve added an interestingly angled lean-to section (Rudolf Steiner would be proud, if he and I had anything to do with one another whatsoever and he weren’t dead -I just had to google if he was dead, that is how little we have to do with one another, but for some reason I think he was against right-angles). This will hopefully house my drawing desk. It doesn’t have all its walls yet because I haven’t decided how I’m going to do the windows.

And I’ve built an extension to the veranda-ish section. Always wanted a veranda! Last year in a tiny corner of this shed I built four banjos, so it definitely needs a veranda on which to pick at least one of them.